Time travel, as we all know, is (1) impossible in any real-life, non-quantum sense, and (2) irresistible to filmmakers. Rian Johnson's Toronto entry "Looper" asks us to accept it as a premise, and you know what? It's handled more realistically here than anything in the plots of the average superhero movie. One of the strengths of time travel is its demonstration that if we could travel through time and meet our parents or even ourselves at an earlier age, it could be an unbearably emotional experience.

PARK CITY, Utah -- I took a day off to cover the Oscars, and I'm nine films behind. That's nine I've seen, not nine I've missed. They are so various and in many cases so good that the problem is to write about them without sounding like a crazed cinemaniac.

There is a kind of shyness, a modesty, about Francis Ford Coppola that is so surprising. Here is the director of "The Godfather," and the epic "Apocalypse Now," and the paranoid psychodrama "The Conversation," and he talks about whether he has the right to put his name above the title. Kids out of film school put their names on their first films, and here he is explaining why his movies are called "Mario Puzo's The Godfather" and "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "John Grisham's The Rainmaker."

PARK CITY, Utah --The theme song of the opening days of this year's Sundance Film Festival should have been "Get a Job." I've seen six American films so far, all of them about characters mired in aimless unemployment or unsatisfying work. Oh, and I saw a Czech film too: That was about a man in Prague who is kicked out of the philharmonic and reduced to playing his cello at funerals.